TAWNI L. TIDWELL, then a graduate student at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded funding in April 2012 to aid research on 'Transmitting Diagnostic Skills in Tibetan Medicine: Embodied Practices for Indigenous Categories of Cancer,' supervised by Dr. Carol Worthman. This research engaged the diagnostic learning processes central to Tibetan medical pedagogy for diagnosing indigenous categories of cancer. It systematically tracked and recorded learning processes in the classroom as well as mentoring sessions in the clinic. It also linked Tibetan medical diagnostics (pulse, urine, tongue, symptomology) with biomedical diagnostics (blood, urine, imaging technology) for over 500 patient cases of indigenous cancer to illuminate synergies with and distinctions from Western biomedical cancer. The current research showed that learning to diagnose such subtle and complex illnesses such as indigenous categories of cancer in Tibetan medicine requires sophisticated sensory entrainment that produces the Tibetan physician as embodied diagnostic tool. Thousands of hours of memorization and oral recitation of root canonical texts written in poetic, metaphorical, and trickster modalities entrains the physician's conceptual, perceptual, and embodied understandings of Tibetan medical theory and practices linked to experiential understandings of the natural world. With clinical engagement and medicinal plant collection and formulation, the macro- and micro-cycles of one's body, bodies of others, and the ecological and social web of relations are tracked, intimately engaged, and allow the Tibetan physician to recognize novel knowledge sets of the body including the development of indigenous types of cancer.

Prasad, Srirupa, U. of Illinois, Urbana, IL - To aid research on 'Gender Construction at Crossroads of Colonialism, Nationalism and Health: A Case Study of Colonial Bengal,' supervised by Dr. Winifred R. Poster

SRIRUPA PRASAD, while a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois, received funding in December 2001 to aid research on gender construction, colonialism, nationalism, and health in Bengal, India, under the supervision of Dr. Winifred R. Poster. Prasad looked at the history and trajectory of medical practice in late colonial Bengal (1885-1935), addressing the absence of the home or household in the literature on the history of medicine in India and arguing that the household was a critical unit of analysis for understanding the history of medical practices in modern societies. In colonial India, ideas about disease, good health, sanitation, diet, cleanliness, and therapeutics were important means through which bodies were controlled and disciplined. They were a part of the nationalist discourse, too, behind which lay a zeal to regenerate the nation through healthy bodies and healthy minds that gave rise to a complex politics between Western and existing traditions of knowledge. Everyday prescriptions for health were also implicated in the construction of gender. Culturally nuanced and traditionally Indian notions of health, disease, and therapeutics played a crucial role in the techniques of bodily discipline, making disciplinary regimes in India different from those in the West at the same time. Prasad found that domesticity and the Indian household were indispensable for understanding anticolonial political nationalism in India and argued that the domain of the political should be extended to include the social forms of bodily disciplining that took place in the private domains of Hindu Bengali society.

SHINGO HAMADA, then a student at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, received a grant in April 2011 to aid research on 'Network, Biotechnology, and Cultural Consensus in Conservation Projects in Coastal Fishing Communities in Northern Japan,' supervised by Dr. Richard R. Wilk. Examining herring restoration efforts in northern Japan as a case study, this research focuses on consensus and variation in the perceptions and practices concerning conservation. Sea ranching projects, fisheries scientific researches, and community-based reforestation efforts for ecosystem recovery have developed in coastal fishing communities in the last two decades, despite the economic and ecological uncertainty of harvests from restoration projects. This ethnographic research describes under what conditions humans engage in conservationist behaviors after experiencing a crisis in coastal common pool resources. This research applied Actor-Network Theory to navigate in and not through a priori defined 'fishing communities,' and it examines how inshore fishers, fisheries managers, fisheries scientists, and seafood buyers interpret local resource issues and restoration and values of conservation. The researcher used qualitative text analysis and questionnaires to understand how fishery techno-sciences influence actors' decision-making processes concerning fisheries management. Ultimately, this research explores how the acts of cultivating seascape through transplanting fish species blurs the boundary between the natural and cultural while becoming an anti-politics machine that blurs locations of environmental stewardships among different social groups.

Walker, Christopher, U. of Chicago, Chicago, IL - To aid research on 'The Social Life of Open-Source Software in Tibet,' supervised by Dr. John D. Kelly

CHRISTOPHER E. WALKER, while a student at the University of Chicago, was awarded a grant in August 2003 to research the social conditions of Tibetan language software development, under the supervision of Dr. John D. Kelly. Central to the research was a study of the Tibetan block of 'Unicode,' the de facto standard for encoding the world's natural languages in computer systems. More than a decade ago, Tibet University in Lhasa (China) played a central role in this emergent and powerful standard. This feat has been celebrated by the Chinese press, which often highlights any state support of science and technology within minority areas. Curiously, however, the study of more recent technical proposals and computer projects involving Tibetan language reveal that China has mixed reactions to the very standard it helped create. Contrary to the philosophy of Unicode, namely that every language should have only one set of codes, China has recently used the 'private use area' of Unicode to define a second, competing standard for Tibetan. The official reasons given for creating two standards for Tibetan language are mainly technical and pragmatic. A deeper analysis has revealed that economic pressure, educational background, and the social environment play a pivotal role in the development of Tibetan information technology in China.

Preliminary abstract: How does patronage-based politics operate in 21st century state formation? This study of everyday politics in southern Nepal asks how patronage as cultural form is refashioned in its engagement with changing economic opportunities, even as renewed development efforts preach its end. Remittances from short-term labor migration to Malaysia and the Gulf now account for close to a third of Nepal's GDP. Most of the migrants are from rural backgrounds, where until recently unequal agrarian relations and elite control over developmental resources formed the basis for political authority, even after Nepal's democratic transition in 1990. How do the new flows of money change the ways in which people imagine and engage these modes of politics, and how do political elites respond? This project uses the competition between established political elites and their lower class, lower-caste challengers as empirical ground for pursuing this question. During 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic research between Kathmandu and a district in the southern plains, I will trace how national level politicians, their constituents, and other political actors, including aid donors and development projects, connect through their historically informed aspirations and everyday politics. Thus, my study foregrounds intertwined processes of contesting meanings and making alliances within, across, and against formal state institutions. Through this anthropology of politics, it clarifies the relationship between everyday politics, contending modernities, and the imagination of material resources, and conceptualizes state formation as continuous process of mutual disruptions.

Preliminary abstract: My engagement project aims to initiate conversations and discussions around how cities shape the lives and gendered identities of women and men and how processes of social exclusion operate through the spaces of the city. To this end my project will conduct day-long workshops on the themes of urban space, gender and masculinity with a wide range of audience including Marathi (native language spoken in Pune)college students, university students, academic scholars and interested publics affiliated to art and culture forums and book reading clubs in the city. I aim to experiment with different kinds of contents for these workshops, including group exercises, films, field trips, reflective writing, reading fiction, poetry and non-fiction. My engagement project will also work towards enabling a group of young researchers from a low caste, working class neighborhood in the city, to undertake a short neighborhood mapping exercise, which will hopefully help in generating a sense of value about their 'place' in the city and create confidence in their ability to produce knowledge about the city for these youth. My larger aim is to facilitate the entry of critical academic insights on urban space and gender in public discourse and to create a much wider 'publics' with whom my research themes would be able to resonate.

PINKY HOTA, then a student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, was awarded funding at May 2007 to aid research on 'From Forest to Nation: Tribal Youth's Participation in Hindu Nationalism,' supervised by Dr. Richard Schweder. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which a violent Hindu nationalist pedagogy has spread in the tribal majority district of Kandhamal in Orissa, India. In so doing, it describes processes through which Hindu nationalist ideologues prescribe an ethical framework of piety and violence against Christian Others in the region, which when followed, index the 'good Hindu' status of tribal communities. The dissertation demonstrates that tribal participants follow such an ethical framework, not just to perform their Hindu morality, but to manage and channel their experiences of marginalization in their everyday lives marked by social and state abandonment. It argues that Kandha participation in Hindu nationalist piety and violence cannot be explained merely by the social, material, and historical forces that structure the lives of Kandha tribals. Rather, it posits that an affective framework is essential in analyzing the participation of Kandha tribals, as these forces impact the affective experiences of communities in ways that exceed the mere sum of their individual effects. Further, it points to the formation of a new subaltern sociopolitical identity in contemporary India, as tribal subalterns transition from 'victims' to violent aggressors through participation in hegemonic nationalist politics.